1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image recording method and an image recording apparatus, more particularly to an ink jet image recording method and an image recording apparatus therefor. The present invention also relates to an image recording acceleration liquid for use in the image recording method and the image recording apparatus.
2. Discussion of Background
Ink-jet printers have been widely utilized in recent years because of the advantages of low noise and low running cost, and color printers capable of producing color images on a sheet of plain paper have also been placed on the market.
Conventionally, as coloring agents for use in inks for office-use ink-jet printers, dyes having high solubility are mainly used in order to avoid a problem of clogging of the nozzles of the ink-jet printers with the inks. Recently, however, pigment-containing inks are also increasingly used to prepare posters which are required to be water-resistant and light-resistant. The pigment-containing inks, however, tend to cause the above-mentioned clogging problem, so that it is extremely difficult to maintain the printing reliability of the inks. Furthermore, when high color reproduction performance is required, for instance, as in photographic images and CG (computer graphics), sufficient coloring of cyan and magenta cannot be performed by the pigment-containing inks and accordingly clear images cannot be obtained by the pigment-containing inks.
When a color image is printed on a plain paper using an ink-jet printer, in order to minimize the spreading of inks in a color boundary portion such as a portion where two colors are superimposed, a surfactant is added to the inks to improve the ink penetration performance as disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application 55-65269. In such a case, feathering takes place in characters or fine lines, so that there is devised such a system that an ink with low ink penetration performance is used only when characters are printed in black. However, the control of the spreading of the inks in the color boundaries and the prevention of the occurring of the feathering in characters and fine lines are both still insufficient for use in practice.
In order to solve such problems as mentioned above, a recording material such as plain paper coated in advance with a material for fixing a dye contained in an ink when images are formed on the surface of the recording material with the ink, or a recording material coated with a white pigment or a water-soluble polymer are disclosed, for instance, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Applications 56-86789, 55-144172, 55-81992, 52-53012 and 56-89594.
Furthermore, in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application 56-89595, there is proposed an ink-jet recording method in which a solution of a polymer such as carboxylmethyl cellulose, polyvinyl alcohol, or polyvinyl acetate is sprayed onto a recording material in advance, and images are thereafter printed by ejecting an ink onto a polymer-solution-sprayed portion of the recording material. In this ink-jet printing method, the sharpness of the printed image can be improved, but the dryness of the printed image cannot be improved. The result is that the image quality of a color image obtained by this ink-jet printing method cannot be improved so much.
For instance, in Japanese Laid-open Patent Applications 64-63185, 8-20159 and 8-20161, there is proposed an ink-jet recording method in which an image recording acceleration liquid which contains a compound capable of making insoluble a dye contained in an ink is deposited on the surface of a recording material by an ink-jet method, and then printing is performed by spraying an ink to a portion of the recording material where the image recording acceleration liquid is deposited. In this method, the amount of water deposited on a two-color superimposed portion on the recording material is so large that the spreading of the ink in the color boundaries cannot be sufficiently controlled and it may occur that the ink penetrates the recording material and reaches the back side of the recording material (this phenomenon is hereinafter referred to as "strike through"). Furthermore, this met hod has the problem that the recording material tends to curl or cockle.